Meet the Leadership: Corporate America and the Religious Right's New Team in the House

In a new Right Wing
Watch: In Focus report, People For the American Way profiles the
House Republicans slated to take important party and committee leadership
positions in the 112th Congress. The incoming leaders and chairmen profiled
share a fealty to corporate America,
eagerness to please the Religious Right, and, often, antipathy toward the core
purposes of the committees they're set to head.

The report, "Meet
the Leadership: Corporate America and the Religious Right's New Team in
the House", profiles 15 incoming House leaders. In addition to
Speaker-to-be John Boehner, famous
for passing out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the House floor, the incoming
party, caucus, and committee leaders include:

• Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, whose Pledge to America,
  crafted with the help of a former Exxon lobbyist, made so many unpaid-for tax
  cut and spending promises that one conservative blogger called it "the
  most ridiculous thing to come out of Washington since George McClellan";

• Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, whose skill with
  earmarks and eagerness to direct federal funds to friends, relatives, and
  unqualified district businesses led a home-state paper to dub him the
  "Prince of Pork":

• Oversight and Government Reform
  Chairman Darrell Issa, who plans
  to double the size of his committee's staff in order to launch
  conspiracy-theory-driven investigations of climate scientists, Consumer
  Financial Protection Bureau architect Elizabeth Warren, ACORN, the Justice
  Department's handling of the New Black Panther Party case, and, of
  course, the Obama White House;

• Budget Committee Chairman and new
  right-wing darling Paul Ryan,
  whose "Roadmap For America's Future" calls for
  eliminating and privatizing social safety net programs and increasing the tax
  burden on lower- and middle-class families while handing big tax cuts to
  corporations and the wealthy;

• Science and Technology Chairman Ralph Hall, who believes that the science
  of climate change has been "manipulated,
  enhanced or deleted";

• Steve King, Chairman
  of the Judiciary Committee's Sub

• committee on
  Immigration, who has compared undocumented immigrants to
  "livestock," agreed with a conspiracy theory about President Obama
  "bringing small quantities of Muslims into this country," and
  called Joseph McCarthy a "hero";

• and Michele Bachmann, chairwoman of the new Tea Party Caucus,
  whose antipathy toward gays and lesbians, the science of evolution, the U.S.
  Census, and President Obama hasn't stopped conservatives ranging from
  Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to Glenn Beck sidekick David Barton from
  agreeing to teach classes in her new seminar on the Constitution.

The full report can be found online at: https://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/meet-the-leadership-corporate-america-and-the-religious-right-s-new-team-the-house